Earlier this week, adjacent to the Australian Senate chamber, the Burnett Institute marked the 30th anniversary of the discovery of HIV. It was a timely reminder of how far we had come in combating the fears and bigotry attached to the disease. A little while later, in the Senate itself, a new law was passed to combat discrimination against ageing lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) Australians.

However, debate on the bill provided the Senate with a rare moment to deliberate on the proper balance between protecting religious freedom on one hand, while at the same time combating the scourge of discrimination.

Understanding the pain of discrimination while wanting to protect religious freedom of expression was eloquently voiced by a Liberal colleague who said “it is not very easy for us to put ourselves in the shoes of a person who finds themselves in that sort of situation, but one of the obligations of a parliament, of us as representatives of the people, is to try and understand the challenges and dilemmas faced by people in those situations”.

Significantly, the bill passed by the Senate - and if agreed, by the House of Representatives - will restrict the ability of faith-based organisations to discriminate against persons based on their sexual orientation, gender identity and intersex status when providing taxpayer-funded aged care services.

As an openly gay but conservatively minded Liberal senator, I abstained from the vote in order to support the extension of anti-discrimination laws to aged care services.

Abstention is a much-maligned option for parliamentarians. However, it remains the most powerful way to adhere to one’s own convictions and conclusions, while respecting the convictions of party colleagues and the party who, through their own processes of reasoning, have arrived at a different view – most particularly if your vote is not critical to the passage of the legislation.

The new law is not a "slippery slope", as some alarmists would want people to believe, but a sensible, timely and precise extension of anti-discrimination laws to aged care services. Nor is it, as some email correspondents have told me, “a precedent for extending the removal of the religious exemption in relation to the provision of education in religious-based schools which would deprive those schools of the freedom to make decisions about preserving the ethos of the school”.

Importantly, the new law protects religious freedoms by keeping an exemption in place for matters relating to employment by faith-based aged care providers, and does nothing to remove existing faith based exemptions for schools and health services.

The Senate’s decision is not a surprise. For many months, parliament has been giving careful thought to the future structure of Australia’s aged care system and the issue of LGBTI ageing has been a recurring theme of its work. While just beginning, the foundations are being laid for a greater appreciation of the uniqueness of LGBTI ageing issues.

Last year, the government launched the first National LGBTI Ageing and Aged Care Strategy, and amendments to the Aged Care Act 1997 to be debated in the Senate this week will add LGBTI people to the "special needs categories" alongside people with culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, Aboriginal people and Torres Strait islanders, veterans and care-leavers. Of all the debates on equality for LGBTI people, it is the issue of aged care that best illuminates the daily challenge and complexity of ageing for LGBTI Australians.

It is a great crime of the gay rights’ lobby that celebrity and focus is given to marriage and parenting rights at the expense of the more substantive issues of LGBTI ageing and mental health - it is harder to get a picture and headline of an ageing gay man than it is to get images of men in wedding dresses.

In the words of Australia’s only community organisation focusing exclusively on LBGTI elders, LGBTI Retirement Association (GRAI), to the Senate inquiry into the aged care reforms “by sending clear signals that an aged care service is a safe place for LGBTI people, these elders may not necessarily ‘come out’ as they would wish to have done but their fears and consequent health impacts will be greatly reduced”.